Fire up the microwave and pop some popcorn; things are about to get really ugly inside the Democratic Party.  Throughout the primary election cycle last year, Bernie Sanders and his supporters angrily alleged that the DNC — supposedly a neutral arbiter — was actually in the tank for Hillary Clinton. This was denied up and down, with a top Hillary spokesman even wielding Bernie’s questions about party favoritism as an attack against him.  The subtext of these tweets was, look at this disloyal, conspiratorial loser.  Memory lane…

Yeah, about that. In her forthcoming book, former DNC chair Donna Brazile absolutely unloads on her party, blasting Barack Obama for decimating the DNC’s finances, savaging the leadership of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and confirming that yes, Hillary Clinton’s campaign had the party in its pocket long before she was its nominee. You’ll likely recall Donald Trump’s frequent play to Bernie supporters during the general election, claiming that the Democratic establishment “rigged” the nominating process against Sanders and for Clinton.  He probably didn’t even realize how absolutely accurate that characterization was.  Politico has published an extended excerpt from Brazile’s book, and oh my, is it explosive.  First, she takes a hatchet to the state of the party heading into the 2016 election:

My predecessor, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had not been the most active chair in fundraising at a time when President Barack Obama’s neglect had left the party in significant debt…Debbie was not a good manager. She hadn’t been very interested in controlling the party—she let Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn do as it desired so she didn’t have to inform the party officers how bad the situation was. The Saturday morning after the convention in July, I called Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of Hillary’s campaign. He wasted no words. He told me the Democratic Party was broke and $2 million in debt.  “What?” I screamed. “I am an officer of the party and they’ve been telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with no problems.” That wasn’t true, he said. Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the DNC’s books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016…If I didn’t know about this, I assumed that none of the other officers knew about it, either. That was just Debbie’s way. In my experience she didn’t come to the officers of the DNC for advice and counsel. She seemed to make decisions on her own and let us know at the last minute what she had decided, as she had done when she told us about the hacking only minutes before the Washington Post broke the news.

She then proceeds to blow the lid off of a scheme through which the Clinton campaign exploited the DNC’s shambolic and desperate financial straits (the place is still a mess) to take effective control of the party…during the primary.  Brazil writes that after she took the helm as acting DNC chair, she vowed to get to the bottom of allegations of unfair treatment.  What she found was straight-up rigging.  Bernie supporters should be livid…